Two Hard-Drives

the O Reilly connection

I noticed in my Dell laptop that there is room for an extra hard-drive. I tried dual booting in the past, but I had no luck. The grub menu failed on me a couple of times so I gave up on it. Do you think dual-booting would perform better with a second hard-drive?

myfreespirit

Dual boot should work well on a single SSD or harder drive, although I don't have experience of setting it up.

My Dell laptop has an SSD and an NVME Pcie drive, and has dual boot - Debian 12 on the NVME, OpenSuse Leap 15.6 on the SSD. The Grub boot menu is on OpenSuse and allows me to select either Debian or OpenSuse at boot time. It was easy to set up too.

the O Reilly connection

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123840109#Comment_123840109

Does it matter what GRUB menu you use? I'm using Ubuntu.

myfreespirit

In theory it shouldn't, but with Linux distro differences, you'd never know.

Both the Debian and OpenSuse Grub menus will find and boot the other distro, but the OpenSuse menu is rather more polished, so I use it

the O Reilly connection

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123840966#Comment_123840966

I use an encrypted hard-drive. Do you think it's better to put the GRUB menu on the second drive which is unencrypted?

myfreespirit

Honestly, I don't know, as I don't have my storage encrypted. Best to check the Ubuntu documentation or post a question on the user forums, to get an informed view.

Sorry I can't help

croo

I have windows on one disk and linux on a second. At boot time, I use the key(s) specific to my laptop (on this HP it's F9) to enter the boot options … this way I have no issues related to the boot system for each OS interferring with each other.

the O Reilly connection

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123844429#Comment_123844429

No problem. Thanks for your help!

LambshankRedemption

GRUB does not strictly have to be installed on the first sector of the hard disk, but it is the most common and recommended practice for BIOS-based systems. Installing GRUB in the Master Boot Record (MBR), which is the first sector of the disk, allows the system to boot directly from the disk without requiring external media like a floppy disk or USB drive(or an encryption key).

So installing GRUB in the MBR would be the recommended way to do it.

Grub is effectively a map to where OS are located so it doesnt matter if the OS is located on a second partition or a second physical drive, so long as GRUB knows the location of the operating system, it will be able to boot.

If you need help getting it up and running I would be happy to lend a hand.